The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
After my freshman year at Ohio University, I returned home for the summer break and got a job at a local restaurant. It was menial work for minimum wage, but my coworkers were decent people and I developed an interest in one of the busgirls, who I didn’t previously know because she had been a couple of years behind me in high school. I asked her out, she accepted, and we arranged to go to a movie the next weekend.
On the appointed day, at the appointed time, I showed up at her house, and we went through the “meet the parents” routine. Her mother was a pleasant woman who was impressed that her daughter had managed to land a date with a “college man.” Her father and brother were working in the garden and she took me out to meet them. Her father seemed less impressed by my collegiate credentials, and the brother seemed downright hostile, but you’ll have that.
On the way to the movie, I casually mentioned that she had never said anything about having a brother. She looked at me quizzically, and then with a sudden note of recognition, laughed and said, “Oh, that wasn’t my brother, that was my ex- boyfriend. He figures that if he stays in good with my dad and hangs out around the house, I will eventually take him back. And dad doesn’t mind the extra help.”
Now, I was 18 years old and had a very specific motivation at the time, so I just let that line of conversation drop, but after our short-lived relationship came to its predictable end, I couldn’t help but think just how messed up it was, not only on the part of the father but on the part of the ex, as well. I swore that I would never get caught puttering in an ex-girlfriend’s garden.
What I failed to recognize is that the metaphorical garden extends well beyond the dirt-filled rows and furrows of personal relationships.
Shortly after moving to Charlotte in 1995, I took a job with a software company that was introducing a new product. They touted it in the interview process as an essential innovation that would sell itself and showed me an ambitious marketing plan that relied heavily on MLM-style seminars. Sales projections were in the tens of millions of dollars for the first year, and the idea of traveling around the region presenting workshops and raking in cash appealed to me. They failed to mention they were rushing the product to market ahead of a competitor, and the extremely buggy initial release was all but useless. By the time the programmers had ironed out most of the kinks, the competitor’s more powerful, less expensive software was released, and the few companies who had purchased our product felt they had been taken.
Sales for the first year were south of $250,000 and I was handling outraged customer calls on nearly a daily basis. Further complicating the situation, the company wasn’t really a good fit for me. The owner never especially liked me on a personal level, and I was an easy scapegoat for the product’s failings.
Applying the “puttering in the garden” principle, I should have bowed out gracefully and moved on to a situation where I could have had a more positive impact. But, like the ex-boyfriend, I thought that given enough time and hard work, I could fix things.
While the rest of the company enjoyed the week between Christmas and New Years with their families, I spent it in the office coming up with an ambitious new sales and marketing plan. This one relied less on events and more on traditional face-to-face presentations. This new approach, combined with a more stable product, improved the situation in the second year. Sales were still well below the initial projections, but they were approaching the break-even point and on an upward trajectory. I believed I had turned a corner.
A few days into my third year, we had our annual corporate retreat where employees from all three of our branch offices, about 30 in all, came to the corporate headquarters in Charlotte to discuss plans for the coming year. The room was stunned when the owner named the office manager of the least successful of the branches to the newly created position of VP of sales and marketing, and I was even more stunned when he used his welcome speech to take a personal shot at me. I still sometimes use his words in my presentations, “Just because you have an idea, John, doesn’t make it a good idea.”
Looking back on it, I should have tendered my resignation the next day, or at the very least launched a very focused job search, but again, I thought the product had turned a corner, and if sales continued to improve, they would have no choice but to recognize my success.
Hand me that hoe.
Predictably, things got worse, not better. Sales continued to improve, but the new VP hired a sales manager to “share the workload,” in effect replacing me without replacing me. I am sure he would have preferred to fire me, but my contract included a buyout clause, should I be let go without cause. It wasn’t an extravagant amount of money. Still, the company was determined they weren’t going to pay it, and I was equally determined that I wasn’t going to let them force me out, so for six whole months I puttered in a garden of rotting fruit as the VP waged a campaign of passive-aggressive slings and arrows and I passive-aggressively absorbed every bloody blow and came out sneering for the next round.
Finally, a calmer head, in the form of my wife, prevailed, and I started looking for a new job. But even that got complicated. I had an interview with a man who, unbeknownst to me, was a personal friend of the VP; word got back to him, and that was the “cause” he needed to let me go without recourse.
Ultimately, everything worked out for the best. My next job was with a consulting firm, which eventually led to a position in economic development, and here we are. Still, I can’t help but feel that I wasted two prime years of my career puttering in a garden that was never going to produce, no matter how diligently I worked at it. When you reach a certain age, that realization hits hard.